Statement of the Technical Field
The inventive arrangements relate to systems and methods for the prevention of theft, and more particularly to tracking items removed without authorization from secured or controlled locations.
Description Of The Related Art
High value merchandise such as hand bags, electronics, apparel, shoes, and other high theft items are subject to smash and grab or organized retail theft. Today, these items are protected with traditional Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) solutions. These EAS solutions include active alarming EAS tags in various formats such as lanyards, pin, and cable options that can trigger an alert from the EAS system. These EAS tags are also available in formats which self-alarm if tampered with or removed from the secured area.
One problem with the use of EAS tags is that they are largely ineffective once they are removed from the secured area or exit of a retail store. The EAS tag triggers the alarm, but the transport of the high value merchandise out of the retail store and/or associated shopping center does not. The person engaging in the unauthorized removal of such item disappears into a crowd of shoppers and/or departs rapidly from the area of the retail store.
A portal is a system which is used for tracking items passing through doorways, hallways or corridors. Many different types of portal systems are possible. These systems can include traffic flow sensors arranged as stand-alone devices or integrated into other types of monitoring systems. For example a traffic flow sensor can be integrated into an EAS pedestal, or may involve an imaging system and suitable video analytics. In such systems, different types of sensing devices can be interconnected and/or used together to provide the directionality function. Conventional EAS portals identify the direction of EAS tags crossing a portal transition defined by a choke point through which items must pass when they move from one defined area to a second defined area. An EAS portal comprising RFID technology consists at minimum of two separate antennas and a RFID reader. The tag directionality is easily determined by the order of the reads. A tag read by a first antenna and then by the second antenna is likely moving from the first to second antenna. RFID portals can also use beam steerable antennas to detect the presence of RFID tags in different locations as they move through a portal zone. In a conventional configuration, the minimum setup is one RFID reader and one beam steerable antenna. In such scenarios, the physical separation between multiple antennas is no longer needed to determine tag directionality.
A number of organizations have set standards for RFID tags. One type of RFID tag for which a standard has been established is known as an EPCglobal UHF Class 1 Generation 2 (hereinafter “EPC Gen2”) type tags. These tags have certain well known characteristics.
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology is a wireless personal area network technology designed and marketed by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. BLE is designed to facilitate reduced power consumption and cost as compared to conventional Bluetooth communications devices, but has a similar communication range. BLE devices can be arranged to form networks which are known as piconets. The network topology that results by the connection of piconets is called a scatternet. There exists a growing body of research involving methods for the formation of scatternets and routing algorithms for multi-hop Bluetooth networks.
The low cost of BLE enabled devices has resulted in an increasing interest in their deployment in a wide variety of ubiquitous applications. For example, BLE technology has been incorporated into smart light bulbs offered for sale by various manufacturers. Indoor proximity systems are also well known in the art. One conventional indoor proximity system is known as iBeacon®. iBeacon® employs Bluetooth communication technology to connect to mobile communication devices (e.g., cellular phones). iBeacons broadcast or advertise self-contained packets of data at set intervals (e.g., 100 ms intervals). These packets are intended for reception by devices such as smartphones or tablets. When received, the packet of data can be used by a smartphone application to trigger events on the device. Standard BLE has a broadcast range of up to 100 meters. Software applications which are installed on a consumer's smartphone can listen for iBeacons located around the retail store. When an iBeacon is detected, it communicates certain relevant data concerning the iBeacon to its server.